The new APK for the clock app from the Android M Developer Preview doesn't look very different from the one you'll find in Lollipop - most of the functions (alarms, world clock, timer, and countdown) are in the same place and operate in the same way. But there's one tiny change that a small amount of users will be extremely happy to see. The Clock app can now "start" your week on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday.

This is one of those little formatting questions that has never really been properly resolved by society. Most western calendars "start" the week on Sunday, but a majority of people with what you might call a normal job go to work on Monday and consider Sunday the "end" of their week. Now you can select the formatting option that makes the most sense to you.

Well, sort of. Unless you practice a religion with a holy day that's not on Saturday or Sunday, or you work at a 24-hour business with a starting day sometime in the middle of the week, or you're a military or medical worker with shifts that would drive a 9-5 person insane. Hey, at least Google's trying. The newly-formatted clock app is available in the developer preview, but if you'd like to try it out on a current Android device, it seems to be working fine on Lollipop.

Download

The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.

You should send feedback. I don't think anybody is looking at code.google.com any more.

Android Developer

It's a new website for M . Where do you think I should send feedback?

roberto.elena

Yeah, that drives me crazy as I use all Google products in US English despite being Spanish, and you never know which products use one date format or the other (not all of them allow to change it). I think you all should use the Japanese format (year/month/day).

Your Mother

your country is free to develop it own stuff, then you can have it your way.

roberto.elena

You know this stuff is not developed by the US government, but by Google, a private entity that earns a lot of money around the world. So, Google doesn't want my money? If it does, then I'm a customer as good as any other in the US.

miva2

I vote for YYYY/MM/DD. That way the alphabetical order of dates is also chronological.

It does makes no sense for you guys.
Here though, Friday&Saturday are the weekend, as Friday is either short in work-hours or a day free for most jobs, and we do start working on Sunday...
What do you do on Friday? also work?

roberto.elena

Where do you live that you start working on Sunday?

Android Developer

Israel.

roberto.elena

Oh I see. Israel must be probably the only country among those that start the week on Sunday that makes it right. I mean both the official week and the work week start on the same day (Sunday).

Android Developer

Isn't it this way in other countries too? What about countries in Europe ?
Also, what do you do on Fridays? And is it true you work a lot on each day?

Ghana, West Africa. Week starts on Monday. Work form Monday to Friday. Saturday - Sunday off, for most 9(We actually start work at 8) to 5s.

roberto.elena

In the USA their Saturday is like your Friday and their Sunday is like your Saturday, in the sense that they don't work (well, many people do work 7 days a week) or go to school on Saturday and Sunday.

BUT they claim their week starts on Sunday, like Israel, which makes no sense to the rest of the world. And I think there are a lot of other countries in the World, mostly in the Americas, that do the same.

In Europe though the week starts on Mondays and we don't work on Saturday and Sunday. So, like in Israel, both the official week and the work week start on the same day. The difference is that it's Monday for Europe and Sunday for Israel.

I didn't know it's so different. So what is the blue far-east area and south Africa work like?
And what's the gray color for? People who work all days? or missing data? :)

roberto.elena

I guess grey is no data or maybe there is no concept of week.

Well there are people working all the week in many countries of the world. In my country (Spain) stores (brick and mortar) used to be opened on Saturdays and closed on Sundays, but in the last one or two decades more and more places (mostly cities) have started opening on Sundays. So there is always people working in many places any day of the week, not only people engaged in services related to emergencies, like police, hospital, etc. which used to be the only people working on weekends not so many years ago.

Regarding the countries in blue, I have no idea how many of them start the workweek on Monday like the USA.

I admit my ignorance on both questions.

Android Developer

Nice.
Here it's about the same about all-week jobs. Most of the all-week jobs are for emergencies and hangouts places (restaurants, cinemas,...).
I think I like it this way. At least one day a week of relative silence. :)

Simos Katsiaris

Sunday is aa Holliday

Your Mother

NYC

roberto.elena

Do you work at B&H Photo Video?

tim242

No it doesn't. The end of the week is one day, just like the start of the week. You have been trained to think of the weekend as two days, but it is just one.

Android Developer

I don't know about other religions, but in Judaism the Sabbath (Saturday) actually starts from the evening of Friday for about 24 hours , so it covers most of Satuday. That's also why the meal we eat together is on Friday's evening.
It might be because of the first chapter in the bible, but I'm not religious so I don't know for sure.
It might also be (and that's just a guess) that when you say "at the end of the day" , you don't really mean 0:00, but more like when your day of work ends, which is near the time that the sun isn't visible anymore.
I still think it's weird though, as for me, the start of the day is when I wake up...

fcjan

Americans just looove to be different for the sake of being different and special..

murica

where do YOU start your week, hotshot?

fcjan

monday like every normal person should..

Deeco

Americans are backward people

ProductFRED

Well screw you too, buddy. For the record, no one here actually considers Sunday to be the beginning of the week.

Let's move on to Metric system first. We'll think about "week starts on.." problem after that.

roberto.elena

Yeah, start with the more drastic and difficult changes and then move on to the small changes... Makes sense to me!

Alexandre Leites

It does when the rest of the world need to adapt their settings because one country want to be different. I hate having to develop this settings on apps or window programs when they need to be multi cultural.

KlausWillSeeYouNow

I don't want the metric system; I like the week the way it is. I think being back-to-back World War champs has earned us the right to use whatever friggin system we like, don't you? :-P

Alexandre Leites

Yes, but then don't make the whole world need to adapt for your ecosystem. I have to speak english to communicate worldwide because the majority of countries who moves the economics speak english, why you guys can't change to the metric system to make the life easier to all majority countries? Oh well...

ReturnOfTheMack

My kind of guy. ^^^

Gregory

Also the US date format like month-day-year confuses me a lot, especially when the day is 12 or less.

I have never thought of this before. Do most western countries really start their day on Sunday, as stated in the article?
In the US, when you are teaching a kid the days, do you start with Sunday?
Like Sunday, Monday, Tuesday... etc? As a person who have always had weeks from Monday-Sunday, this is interesting to me.

thats nothing, who the hell came up with the idea that January is the first month when its really the 11th month.

Carlos Bailey

Security contractors.

Joakim

Why isn't this a global setting under time& date???

roberto.elena

It should not be just a global setting in Android, it should be a global setting in the Google Account. For example there is a global setting in Android for the time format (24h vs. am/pm), but when I use Inbox on the web and I snooze an email, although it recognizes the 24h format it always displays the am/pm format, and there is no way of changing it like for example in Google Calendar, which incidentally does also allow to change the first day of the week on the web.

My question is... Does it finally have custom notification settings for the countdown timer alarm? I do NOT always want to have a blaring alarm go off.

niknetniko

I think most of Europe starts on Monday, like normal people.

ProductFRED

For all of the a-holes calling us Americans idiots, nobody here in the US begins their week on Sunday. The beginning of the week is Monday. The weekend consists of Saturday and Sunday. Get off your high horses.

Imparus

And that is what makes it so stupid :-/

Android Developer

What I wish to have on the alarm-clock feature is that it will dismiss itself easier, as it's a bit hard to take the phone and then choose to dismiss it right when you get up.
A simple sensor check would be enough, like moving the device a bit or raising it.

pfmiller

Dismiss or snooze? Dismissing an alarm shouldn't be too easy, that gets people in trouble.

Snoozing the alarm is already pretty easy, I never have any trouble hitting a volume button to shut it up.

Android Developer

Dismiss. I wake up very easily, but I hate the amount of focus right on the morning just to dismiss the alarm clock. Sometimes I even hold the device upside down when doing so.

Sven A.

Got the OPO cmOS12 you not install it. Anyone know why?

Gregory

Because the clock apk built into your system has a different signature than the one posted here. The only way you can fix this is to delete the system one first, however, you'll need root for that and most likely you won't be able to take any OTAs afterwards.

an

That's just stupid, they should let you pick any day like some apps do. People work all kinds of weird schedules.

Darp Nagarsheth

This preview has one of the most annoying bug I have ever encountered in android which is not going to stop me from using it.
Phone disconnects WiFi and reconnect it like crazy I haven't been able to install all of my apps even after 36 hours of flashing it just disconnects out of nowhere and connect again after 1 minute. Don't know if that's only me but if anyone have found a temporary fix please let me know,﻿

Ugh, the FAB still just dissapears and reappears when you slide from clock to timer to stopwatch instead of animating away and back.

Avengeds32

It's working fine on kit Kat too!

Martin Žebula

Install fails on my OnePlus One with stock ROM.

Durra

Thank you AP for this APK. Now I can replace the touchwiz clock app which sucks. It only lets me snooze 3 times with 5mins intervals.

larry9

It's kind of amazing that people will insult each other about their preferred method of stating the date. But keep reading!

WestSiide

Just goes to show people will find any fucking reason to argue and insult each other.

quiteman1

so I sat waiting for a table at a nearby restaurant across from a young guy with his girlfriend. He was holding and looking at his cell phone, at the same time having an I-watch rapped around his wrist. My thought was, is he really thinking of having a meaning discussion and dinner was the person he was with. for these kind of people, there is no such thing as the beginning of the week.

blair houghton

Our long national nightmare is over.

Kostas Xirog

Why?

Alexander Brown

Works loverly on kitkat

Entin

"But there's one tiny change that a small amount of users will be extremely happy to see."
Yeah, a small amount of users. Just the whole world minus Israel and (I think) USA. Almost insignificant.